Communication

International Women's Day on March 8, is a day of celebration, acknowledging the social, economic, cultural, political and scientific achievements of women. It is also a day of strikes and activism, serving to highlight deficiencies that still exist and to demand the progress that must still be achieved in advocating and ensuring the rights of women and accelerating better gender balance in all areas of life. 

NCCR MARVEL director Nicola Marzari and Anatole von Lilienfeld, project leader of Incubator Project 2, were both cited in the Journal of Chemical Physics's Editor's Choice 2018 list, a selection of the JCP articles presenting significant and definitive research in experimental and theoretical areas of the field.  

A team made up of Giovanni Pizzi from NCCR MARVEL and Sara Bonella and Ignacio Pagonabarraga from the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM) won an EPFL Open Science Fund to build an open, collaborative online hub to host simulation and data-analysis tools. The project — called OSSCAR (Open Software Services for Classrooms and Research) — will effectively create an open-science environment that offers software tools as easy-to-use services requiring little or no setup time. 

Registrations for the 2019-2020 edition of the mathematics workshops Maths en jeu open on 4 Feb 2019. These workshops are taking place at EPFL and target girls and boys 8 to 15 years old. They are part of the equal opportunities actions of the EPFL Science outreach department supported by MARVEL.

We are happy to announce that Tara Niamh Tosic (EPFL, Switzerland), Julieta Trapé (National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina), Sinjini Bhattacharjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India), Maria Syzgantseva (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia) and Chiara Devescovi (Sacred Heart Catholic University, Brescia, Italy) were granted INSPIRE Potentials – MARVEL Master's Fellowships after the October 2018 call. All five women will join MARVEL labs in the coming months -- congratulations!

A team of NCCR MARVEL PIs has won a swissuniversities P-5 grant to further develop the Materials Cloud web platform for Computational Open Science. The project will ultimately allow users to autonomously contribute hundreds of different data entries in the different sections without having to interact with one of the platform maintainers. 

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding of 18 million Swiss francs for its second phase, which will run until April 2022.  

Two MARVEL postdocs and three PIs will give invited talks at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, being held March 4- 8 in Boston, Massachusetts.

MARVEL and EPFL's Science outreach department announce three equal opportunity initiatives targeting girls and boys. They will take place at EPFL in 2019.

Annual list from Clarivate Analytics identifies researchers with multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year.

Some 17'000 visitors took part in the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair Scientastic on 10 and 11 November.  The theme of the fair was “digitalization at your fingertips” and presenters, including NCCR MARVEL, tackled the question of how to make digitalization easy to understand through a series of demonstrations, displays, talks and workshops. This was the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair – the next will be held in Sion (Valais) on 18–19 May 2019. Some pictures from the MARVEL stand are below: all photo credits to NCCR MARVEL.

An installation sponsored by NCCR MARVEL and EPFL's Institute of Materials now inspires those passing through the entry hall of building MX on the EPFL campus.